"Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors. "

Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art
(Dan Franck, Cynthia Liebow (Translator)
)
Paris is a mythical city, a capital of the arts synonymous with some of the most legendary events in world culture. This reputation has never been so richly deserved as at the beginning of the twentieth century, when fauvism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism were born in a heady atmosphere that gave way to the modern sensibility. In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a magical exploration of the city and its hotbeds of artistic creation. He introduces erudite and eros-obsessed poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the painter Amedeo Modigliani, generous to a fault even when starving; the opportunistic but brilliant Jean Cocteau; rival geniuses Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. We encounter American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and form-breaking modern writer and salonist nonpareil Gertrude Stein. Painters and writers, sculptors and poets, they lived like characters in a Balzac story, working, loving, and struggling against a backdrop of extravagant parties and dire poverty. With a novelist's verve and a historian's skill, Dan Franck paints this remarkable time, capturing the beauty and vitality distilled from these artists' lives, which became the cornerstones of great art.

Conversations With Picasso
(Brassai, Jane Marie Todd (Translator), Henry Miller (Preface)
)
"Read this book if you want to understand me"--Pablo Picasso Since the early days of his career, Brassaï has been our guide to avant-garde Paris. Not only was Brassaï a noted photographer--nicknamed "the eye of Paris" by Henry Miller--he was also a prolific author and journalist whose Letters to My Parents was named "a small classic in the history of the medium" by Jed Perl in the New Republic. In that book, as well as many others, Brassaï described, with wit and humor, the many important artists and writers with whom he developed close personal and professional relationships. Not the least among these was Picasso. Brassaï recorded his many meetings and appointments with the great Spanish artist from 1943 to 1946, resulting in Conversations with Picasso.

Pablo Picasso: The Lithographs
(Pablo Picasso, Felix Reusse, Henri Deschamps
)
Like no other medium in which he worked, Picasso's lithography only began to realize its full potential in the decades after 1945. This new volume presents Picasso's entire lithographic oeuvre, consisting of 855 pieces-for the first time in full color throughout the book. Assembled over the course of three decades, this collection is unmatched, impossible to be repeated or recreated in the same way. Its uniqueness lies in the rarity of its test and state printings, and its numerous single printings and unpublished sheets. Pablo Picasso: The Lithographs is the first collection of such work to list every printed sheet as an individual work and thus constitutes the most reliable reference work for the artist's lithographic oeuvre. An interview with printer Henri Deschamps offers an immediate, contemporary account of the process of creating the sheets, and Erich Franz's illuminating introduction to Picasso's lithography sharpens the viewer's eyes to the innovative diversity of this master artist whose importance has still yet to be completely accounted for.

The Ultimate Picasso
(Brigitte Leal, Christine Piot, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Jean Leymarie
)
Of all the books on the man many consider the greatest genius of 20th-century art, this sumptuous work stands out as truly the "ultimate" Picasso. Not only does it cover in one volume all the periods of Pablo Picasso's long, incredibly versatile career-with exquisite reproductions of nearly every significant work he ever created-but the scholarship is impeccable: each of the three authors is a leading authority on a particular period of Picasso's artistic evolution.
Brigitte Léal covers Picasso's formative years from 1881 through 1916, including his invention of Cubism with Georges Braque. Christine Piot explores the astonishingly fertile period from 1917 through 1952. Marie-Laure Bernadac discusses the unabashed vigor of Picasso's later years, from 1953 until his death in 1973. Nearly 1,200 magnificent reproductions, 720 in full color, illustrate Picasso's breathtaking range of artistic expression.
Picasso once boasted that a book would have to be written on him every day to keep up with his creative surges. Perhaps. But for art lovers and students seeking just one book, The Ultimate Picasso is unsurpassed.